I've noticed in some published photographs the notation of what seems to me to be unusual F stops, for example Larry Ulrich's California poppies @ f/38, and David Muench's Monument Valley @ f/28. I'm assuming this to be another way of expressing thirds of a stop?

-- Michael Mahoney (mmahoney@nfld.com), May 15, 2001

Answers

How pretentious, (or anal)!
I wonder if they took the bellows extension into account when calculating the true f number?

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), May 15, 2001.

Yep, you got it. I have seen mainly European photographers using that system, probably the same reason they have metric and we fractions, and that reason would be...?

-- Tom Percival (envisionphoto@yahoo.com), May 15, 2001.

How about a shutter speed priority automatic exposure camera? The obsessive part is recording that odd f stop!

-- Joe Lipka (JoeLipka@compuserve.com), May 15, 2001.

I like using the Uniform Scale (US) like on my Kodak Autographic Jr.. U.S. = N*N/16 where N is the conventional f number. The number is proportional to exposure.

-- John H. Henderson (jhende03@harris.com), May 15, 2001.

Michael, I am not familiar with the format used by the people that you have mentioned but would like to say that if the work is shot on 35mm using PROGRAM, it will use odd f/stops like that.

-- Dave Anton (daveanton@home.com), May 16, 2001.